Health's Blog (Page 7)

Vinegar’s not a magic elixir—but it may be able to help your waistline, cholesterol and more! Who knew?

This may be an overshare, but I’ve been known to drink a slug of vinegar now and then. My 2-year-old daughter apparently picked up this trait: once when we were out for dinner, she took an unprompted sip of the vinegary brine from her bowl of pickles. (Good girl.) Little did I know that we were doing more than fulfilling a craving. We were also enjoying the health benefits of vinegar.

Read on to find out some of the surprising health benefits of vinegar, as reported by Gina Roberts-Grey for EatingWell magazine.

Staying healthy while you’re flying can be challenging (especially if you’re stuck in the air during mealtime).

Luckily, it’s getting easier, as more airports are carrying healthy snacks like plain yogurt, nuts and dried fruit. With a little advance planning, you can pack your own healthy snacks—but that’s not always an option.

To help you make healthy choices at 30,000 feet, we scoured airline menus for nutritious airplane food that would fight off mid-flight hunger pangs. And although airplane food has a bad reputation, we were pleasantly surprised to find airlines carrying healthy in-flight eating options.

Our menu picks include a balance of healthy proteins and some healthy fats, both of which keep you from getting hungry better than sugar and other refined carbs. We also looked for dishes with whole grains, fruits and vegetables—...

The thinking behind the old saying "feed a cold, starve a fever" goes like this: fasting causes a drop in body temperature, which helps to fight a high fever, while eating raises your temperature, warming you up if you have a cold and keeping your sniffles at bay.

In some regards, starving a fever is sensible: a couple small studies tell us that fasting ramps up the part of your immune system that fights bacteria, which cause some illnesses like strep throat and ear infections. Eating, on the point of feeding a cold, seems to stimulate your immune system to attack viruses like the common cold.

But, unfortunately it’s not that simple: fevers can be caused by both bacteria and viruses. The flu, for example, is a virus. And sicknesses like pneumonia may be fueled by either a virus or a bacterium.

Kale’s über-healthy reputation is in part thanks to the cancer-fighting compounds it boasts called glucosinolates. But there’s a compound within glucosinolates that interferes with your thyroid function—and some may worry that eating too much kale could hurt their thyroid and possibly even cause hypothyroidism (underactive thyroid). (Why does that matter, you ask? Your thyroid regulates many body functions—and top on the list is metabolism.)

But there’s more to the story.
Dig a little deeper and you’ll learn a chain of reactions has to happen for those thyroid-interfering compounds—called thiocyanates—to be released. Cooking kale stops that chain of reactions from happening. However, chopping raw kale for a salad or chewing it does allow thiocyanates to form. But the quantity of thiocyanates in a few ounces of raw...